There is a need to monitor the location of objects and people, especially children. The most common scenario occurs where a parent or a supervising person is located with his children or supervised persons in a crowded site such as a mall, amusement park, airport, museum, or beach. In such event, the parent/supervisor faces a significant difficulty in keeping the children/supervised persons in his vicinity while allowing other children or persons in his supervision to wander in the proximate vicinity. For example, a supervising adult may find it difficult to supervise each of three children wishing to view different pictures in a museum or wishing to enter different stores in a mall. One of the common scenarios is a parent being occupied and concentrated in a mobile phone call, loosing contact with one or more children during the phone call.
There are existing solutions to the need to keep track of children or other objects location, such as the commercially known “ionkids” system. “ionKids” allows parents to monitor the locations of up to four kids via splash- and tamper-resistant wrist tags that transmit a radio signal to a base unit by which their proximity is determined. See www.ionkids.com.
However, existing solutions are limited in practicality due to the fact that they make use of a dedicated control and monitoring device that is both expensive and relatively heavy and large in size.
There is therefore a need for a monitoring system that communicates with common mobile devices and particularly with personal digital assistant devices (PDA) typically mobile or wireless phones and preferably responsive to a child or object getting farther during a phone call session.
There is a need for a monitoring system that exploits the capabilities of existing wireless devices such as mobile phone and other PDA or handheld devices.